Author Archives: TonyAttwood

Unusually for Dylan, Dirt Road Blues demands to be seen not as a stand alone song but in the context of Time out of Mind, the album on which it appears.   Dirt Road Blues is revealed as track two … Continue reading →

by Tony Attwood This review updated 23 Feb 2018, correcting a mistaken historical reference and adding a link to the song on Spotify.  There is also a clarification about the war of 1812, and much more in relation to this … Continue reading →

Review by Tony Attwood, updated August 2018. In this review I’ve given a couple of live versions of the song plus the official original video, although sadly in many of the live versions available Bob’s singing is hard to hear.  … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood Updated 12 Sep 17 It has taken me a long old time to get here, but a very special thanks to our correspondent who pointed out that Jelly Roll Morton and His Red Hot Peppers had recorded “Each … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood This was the second review I wrote of “It takes a lot to laugh”.   Indeed over time the song has had quite a few reviews and mentions here: there is an index at the end. Returning to … Continue reading →

Day of the Locusts We know a fair amount the day of the Locusts from David Crosby’s commentary about how he, Sara and Bob Dylan attended the honorary doctorate award at Princeton University – an occasion Bob Dylan did not … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood This article updated 6 Spetember 2019. Although there is little musical connection between “Honest with Me” from “Love and “Theft”, and Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues, there is a connection via the lyrics. Consider the opening of … Continue reading →

Dylan’s “High Water (For Charley Patton)”  is based on three chords but in effect two of the three chords are just used in passing at the end of each verse to the line “High water everywhere”.  As a result virtually … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood This review updated July 2018, with help from Larry Fyffe, and it now includes links to two live versions by Dylan, plus a version by Howard Markman and Glenn Workman with The Stone Hill All Stars. I … Continue reading →

Tweedledum and Tweedledee are characters in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There a book which I was read by my father as I grew up as a child.   I suspect many other children of the era had … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood Just how surreal do you want to be?  Just how far can the three major chords that make up the blues be taken?   Consider just one line: “The reincarnation of Paul Revere’s horse”. Paul Cable, who wrote … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood In one sense all you need to know is that Highway 61 is the Blues Highway.  But it is also rather helpful to know that Abraham was the name of Bob Dylan’s father. I have three versions … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” is a strophic classic blues which takes the 12 bar structure and stretches to the limit by using an inventive melodic line. What Dylan here is gives a nightmare story incorporating other … Continue reading →

By Tony Attwood It is not my job to summarize the commentaries from elsewhere about how this song has been re-written using lines from classic movies.  Larry Fyffe on this site does it far better than I ever could.  The … Continue reading →